Wellingtonians: From the Turnbull Library collections

David Colquhoun

$29.99

This is a book for everyone who has experienced Wellington. It began as a series of pictorial features in a community newspaper, and its offbeat look at the city’s history has proved popular. Now it is a book with new pictures and stories.

Description

The pictures come from the collections of New Zealand’s famous Alexander Turnbull Library. There are photographs, paintings, cartoons, manuscripts, posters, sketches and novelty postcards. No other book about the city has ever included quite such a variety of views.

Each has a story, and all are very different: They include Te Aro Pa in 1841, punk protests at Parliament, a young local at Gallipoli and Town Hall pandemonium when the Rolling Stones hit Wellington. Or you can read about jazz dancing in the flapper age, high fashion in the fifties or the great earthquake of 1855. There are wrestlers and rugby players, flying boats and electric trams, gales and shipwrecks, even a singing ventriloquist and a venomous Sumatran rat monkey.

There is certain to be something you didn’t know about Wellington, a little city truly like no other.

About the author

David Colquhoun has been Manuscripts Curator at the Turnbull for twenty years. There is still nothing else he would rather do. He has written articles and curated exhibitions about many aspects of New Zealand’s history. This is his second book.